


Tinkerbells and Faerie Spells

by Dorkangel



Category: Les Misérables (2012), Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Schönberg/Boublil, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: (PS not incesty between Cosette and Valjean), Abusive Relationships, Alternate Universe - Faerie, Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, Alternate Universe - Magical Realism, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst and Feels, Canon-Typical Puns, Confused Valjean, Cosette Fauchelevent & Jean Prouvaire Friendship, Courfeyrac Is A Little Shit, Dark, Dubious Morality, Father-Daughter Relationship, Just actually quite a lot of just actual murder, Look I'm not gonna bullshit you, Multi, Murder, Parent Valjean, Poor Combeferre, Poor Joly, Poor Valjean, Seelie Court, To the point of straight-up evil tbh, Unhealthy Relationships, Unseelie Court, dark Cosette, the Eposette is brief and the Jeanparnasse is of the decidedly unhealthy kind, well not really but kind of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-04
Updated: 2015-11-20
Packaged: 2018-04-28 07:54:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 13,551
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5083975
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dorkangel/pseuds/Dorkangel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When she was three years old Euphrasie Fauchelevant disappeared for an hour, much to the terror of her papa. It turned out alright, though, because she was never seen again and a faerie child named Cosette was sent back in her place.<br/>Or is that not a happy ending at all?</p><p>*</p><p>In which the Fair Folk are far, far more powerful than anyone ever suspects, mortals are funny and disposable, Montparnasse makes a pretty Seelie poet into his pet, the Solitary Fae are surprisingly charming, and Cosette flutters into her life and flutters right back out fine on the other side - only a little... blood-drenched, that is.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Beginning

**Author's Note:**

  * For [everheartings](https://archiveofourown.org/users/everheartings/gifts).



> DARK DARK DARK TWs COMING OUT THE LITERAL PIXIE WAZOO  
> The title is intended to be juxtaposed with the content, please, please don't use this as a bedtime story or anything. Ever. It gets darker as she gets older, by the way.

Cosette has always known.

Her first memory, as sharp and clear as though it was only yesterday and not nearly fourteen years ago, is walking through the forest, all alone. She’s small, and when she glances down her feet are bare and pudgy, but her steps are unfaltering. An adult walking in the body of a child.

In her memory is the music of bells. They are so much louder than they ever sound for her now, the tinkling, constant call of the bells in her head – sometimes high and delicate, sometimes low and booming. But with every step that she takes away from the forest, the bells fade in volume to a barely audible pianissimo that some days is still deafening.

She feels dreamlike, hazy, but then her little toes are on soft, dewy grass and the bells have gone away and she doesn’t understand anymore. The movement of her fingers, when they come up to brush against the flowers in her hair, is clumsy, and her thoughts have slown down to a child’s, and she _doesn’t understand anymore_.

So she screams, a shrill sob that doesn’t make any sense to her to begin with. It’s nothing more than instinct.

“Papa!” shrieks Cosette in the memory, and an incomprehensibly tall figure comes rushing towards her and gathers her up in his arms.

“Oh, Cosette,” he cries, relieved. “I’m so glad you’re safe!”

 _Cosette_ , she remembers thinking. There’s no emotion in it. _That is my name now_.

“I thought I’d lost you,” continues the man, and she smiles slightly. He has lost more than he will know for a long time – his sweet, wholly human little daughter is gone.

She has many memories in that vein. When she was three years old and little Euphrasie Fauchelevant disappeared for an hour ( _and was never seen again_ , she giggles to herself in the small hours) is the first of them, and then, years later, the sight of something other than the angelically blonde, pink-skinned little girl in the mirror. She glances out of the corner of her eye one day, age six, and catches a glimpse behind a glamour too well-cast to ever falter – lily-white skin, snowy hair and black lips, black veins, black eyes like that of a bird, even the sclera – and happily draws pictures of herself that way for days, because the faerie child she saw is so much _prettier_ than the human child.

*

Her papa has always known too.

Not in the same way, not in the simple surety of a child’s ingrained secrets, but something in the instinct of the parent he never was, no longer is, but somehow always will be. Euphrasie Fauchelevant (‘Cosette’ was her nickname too, because she was so small – _cosetta_ , little thing – but there is a jealousy in the new Cosette, alien and fierce and all-consuming, that has her howling and clawing at things in the thought that _her_ things, _her_ identity, _her_ papa were someone else’s before they were hers.), she was the daughter of his friend, and when his friend died he took the child as per her wishes and raised her as best he could on his own. She knows all too well – hears voices sometimes, on the wind or in the bells or between the trees – that the fae on the other side of the woods wanted her just as bad as the fae that got her, and something in the back of her mind sneers _good, Seelie trash didn’t deserve little Euphrasie anyhow._

But Euphrasie went away anyway, called by sweet voices and bell-song and not distinguishing between the sunlit orchard of the Seelie court and the twisted willows of the Unseelie, and the Unseelie sent back a little creature in her place.

Papa knows this almost the moment that he has stopped comforting his lost daughter and promising the child that he loves her, because she yelled for him but then falls eerily silent. Just staring at him, with eyes slightly a colder shade of blue than they had been before, and blonde curls falling in a slightly different way.

The hair on the back of his neck stands up, he feels ill at ease, but he blinks it off. Cosette is only three. She’ll cry later, get this strangeness out of her system. The differences – there are none, he’s letting his imagination run away with him again.

“Where did you get those flowers?” he hums to her, trying and failing to extract the crown from where it is woven into her hair.

 _From the people in the trees,_ she thinks, _an ornament on a sacrifice_ , and out loud she says, “They were a gift, Papa.”

“From who?” he asks, and when she smiles, it is so wide that he feels a chill run down his spine despite the innocent asymmetry of her one missing baby tooth.

“No one at all.”

He knows all the strange things about her, over the years. He knows the way she never, ever cries and rarely bleeds, no matter how bad her injury, the way that the other children sense something and avoid her. The way that she strays into the forest sometimes, late at night, and nothing he says or does can stop her.

He also notices the way that the cats in the neighbourhood go missing, but it seems too dark a thought to even consider that perhaps the corpse of one of them, which a farmer found in his field with wildflowers growing out of its eye-sockets and between its ribs, was put there by Cosette.

(The bells are insistent, occasionally. She hears orders from a queen in their melodies, and she is a changeling, yes, but a faerie first. Sacrifices must be given, and if she continues to grow flowers in the kitty-cats after the voices say she can stop, well, they look prettier that way.)

One day, when he thinks she is asleep and she is laying in bed peacefully but quite awake, he pauses by the door she has left ajar and whispers to her:

“What _are_ you, Euphrasie?”

The resting form of the girl turns over, and her eyes – blue as cranesbill flowers and forget-me-nots, blue as the lips of drowned men – seem to bore straight through the earthly fabric of him.

She is only six, but he takes a fearful step back from her. Because she is not six. She is something so, so much older than he or any other mortal could ever know, and for a moment he senses that.

“I’m not Euphrasie.”

Cosette is suddenly aware that the magic over her would let her lift her glamour in an instant and be upon him before he could move. But, he’s still her papa. He knows all the strange things about her... and somehow he still loves her.

She’s not certain if she loves him back. The possibility is real enough that little Cosette hesitates, offers him a divine benediction, a chance to live another day.

“I’m Cosette.” she continues, coolly. “I came from the woods.”

He clicks the door closed, and she knows that he won’t call the police. That night, she dreams of what he is doing, crying silently at the kitchen table with his fingers tangled in a rosary. He loves a little devil in the shape of a cherub, and he can’t resolve that with his beliefs.

There is no guilt in her heart at all.

The next morning, she takes her papa by the hand and leads him outside, into the cold and misty winter air. She is of the winter, born when the dark rules, and the bells ring loudest through the biting fog. She will pay attention to them later, though.

“Look,” she says, and when she leans down and touches the ground a daisy blooms. Of course, the grass is stiff and glassy with frost, so the daisy wilts and dies immediately. That’s just nature. Why cry over the fragility of mortal life when it is oh-so cheap?

“Look what I can do.”

He smiles, astonished, but it fades when she turns and does the same thing on concrete. Just another touch and another daisy, forcing itself through the had stone of the road to die because she willed it so.

“I can do anything.” she tells him, and beams sweetly. She _can_.

“Will you?”

Her papa is so clever. Everybody else, even the grown-ups at school who suspect something, doesn’t ask the right questions. _Cosette, is everything alright at home? Cosette, what do you see in the ink-blot? Cosette, why did you push him?_ There’s no ‘because’ in a faerie’s action, no reason why. Papa asks the right questions.

“If I feel like it.” she shrugs, because that’s the only reason she really does anything. Survival is one thing, and so is revenge, but amusement is the only thing that matters.


	2. The Seelie Boy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A wild Jehan appears! As does Montparnasse, unfortunately...

The first time she meets one of her own kind, she is ten. Cosette will always be small, but people step back when they see her, for it is springtime and she wears black and a crown of snowdrops to mourn the death of winter.

She is in class, and the teacher is spewing some nonsense about evolution. Humans are on top of the foodchain, he reasons, of any foodchain, because there is no other predator that can best them. Cosette wonders if that is how a dog raised without knowledge of humans would think of itself.

And then, through the window, she hears the sound of a flute.

It’s like being electrified. The flute music can’t, it’s impossible, but it’s to the same tune as the bells. Different, never quite the same, and then arching with more triumphant themes than the minor keys of the melody she’s used to.

But it fits to the music in her head.

Ignoring the faint sounds of her teacher and the lower murmur of her classmates – _Cosette? What’s wrong, Cosette? No, young lady, sit down this instant! –_ Cosette launches herself over the desk and bolts. It’s a long route to the music, darting into cupboards and corridors and leaving false trails to escape detection, but she reaches it eventually, breathless and delighted and standing like a shadow in the doorway of the music department’s battered practice room.

The boy with the flute is pretty, but not as pretty as Cosette. Especially if she’s in her natural form; in the woods she feels the brush of wings behind her, not the wings of the angel she resembles, but of the insects she picks apart on windowsills for fun.

He has long ginger hair, plaited untidily over his shoulder, soft hazel eyes, and delicate freckled skin. Cosette waits for him to finish his phrase and grin up at her to tear away the spell over him.

He reels backwards with it, almost as though she has physically hit him, and stumbles into the wall.

“Oh, don’t cry,” she says, gently closing the door behind them. The boy – no longer a boy now, but quite another thing – seems a little older than her, and she _never_ cries. He has no right to. “This is how you were meant to be.”

He gazes up at her in wonder, and she runs her fingers through his hair. It’s a different sort of red than it was – more like blood, and his skin has an earthy green tinge to it, like a sapling tree – and his eyes are big and foreign in his newly angled face.

“Has anyone ever told you that you have doe eyes?” she asks, and he nods. “Real doe eyes, now. Where did you come from?”

“The orchard by the sea.” he confesses, shifting awkwardly and trying to regain some composure. It doesn’t work: she knows what he means immediately, and scowls. Seelie.

“The humans they left me with moved here, I couldn’t stop them.” he continues to protest, and she sees that his mouth is full of hundreds of needle-like teeth. “I thought perhaps I might slit their throats, but I’ve been investigated enough already.”

“You don’t dress human,” she agrees. “They like to assign genders to things, you see.”

“Oh, but that’s so boring.”

“You’re a siren.” she realises with delight. The beautiful music, the beautiful eyes, the sharpened nails and teeth.

“A land siren, fortunately. They left a brother for me too, but he couldn’t quite figure out his new lungs.”

They both smile darkly, and it feels nice to have someone understand her sense of humour for once. That image, the boy asphyxiating on the floor - how is that _not_ funny?

She sits down next to where he is still crumpled against the wall.

“They call me Jean.” he tells her, surveying his tapered hands and claws with some bemusement.

“What do you call yourself?”

“Jehan.”

At her curious expression, he laughs at himself a little. “It fits better into my songs. What do they call you?”

“Euphrasie. But, my name’s Cosette.”

“You’re a faerie?”

“Uh huh.”

They sit in silence for a moment, gentle and in the company of their own kind for once and ignoring that he is born of Summer and she is born of Winter. Suddenly uncomfortable in this false skin, Cosette lifts her glamour and lets her newfound, tattery wings unfurl behind her.

“The real Jean,” she murmurs, leaning her snowdropped head on his shoulder. “What happened to him?”

Jehan snickers.

“He and his brother wandered into the orchard, just by chance. They ate the fruit there. Anyone else would have been killed for it, but they...” He twines one strand of her fair hair between his fingers. “They were charming, I suppose.”

“Euphrasie did nothing.”

“You sound almost as though you pity her.”

“I envy her.”

“You took her life away.”

“No.” It’s a bitter hiss, the antithesis of her normal voice. “Her life is limp, insipid. Human. _She_ took _mine_.”

“Cosette,” Jehan says suddenly, and she is jarringly reminded that they are trapped in children’s forms. The childish behaviour just won’t fade – like that ‘Cosette’, no faerie would say it like he did. He swallows nervously before he repeats himself.

“Cosette. I think your side- the Unseelie, I think the Unseelie are going to dispose of me in a river somewhere, or something. For hanging around their territory.”

She opens her mouth to speak, and then closes it again as the wind picks up and a voice on the wind breathes _his head or yours, little thing._

“I’ve never spoken to them.” she says, as an excuse. It’s not quite a lie (not that she feels any compunction about lying); they whisper to each other and she overhears, or they whisper little warnings to her, but she’s never whispered back.

He nods shakily, and she knows that she can do nothing. _He’s as good as dead already_ , she thinks as she recasts their glamours. The effect of his sad brown eyes is lessened somewhat when you’ve seen his even bigger, even browner ones.

“I’ll see you,” she promises, hoping even as she says it that it’s not entirely empty.

This time, when Cosette flees she doesn’t stop. Jehan is playing his flute again to the tunes in head (and her head too) and she can’t stand to hear it, so she runs home, tearing at the trees on the outskirts of the forest as she does because she wants to hurt the woodland fae but doesn’t dare get too close.

She falls into her papa’s arms when she arrives. He holds her, with that look of confusion and worry that he’s been wearing for months now, but it’s not enough.

Maybe it would be enough to make the policeman hang himself, she considers, as he comes into school and gravely takes his hat off and announces Jehan’s disappearance. But he’s only trying to help – so all that happens to him is that his car won’t start for a week. He should be more grateful, really. ~~Jehan’s~~ _Jean’s_ parents get much worse for their folly in moving him towards danger.

She’s not sure why she cares so much. Emotions aren’t necessarily abhorrent to her, she just usually doesn’t get them, but then again, Jehan’s the only other fae she’s ever met. It mattered, is all.

Cosette stays out of the woods for weeks, no matter how much the bells begin to jangle discordantly, curls up with the flowers on the lawn and almost stops talking to her papa altogether. It doesn’t matter. He’s human, just a disguise really.

This goes on until she allows herself to sleep among the daisies she grows, properly and deeply, and finds herself in the darkened willow grove where the Unseelie hold court. Between the trees are pale faces and dark eyes, brown faces and wolf eyes, green faces and doe eyes. But Cosette doesn’t pay attention to them. On the dirt floor, at odd angles and silent and staring up mindlessly at the stars, is Jehan. For a siren, he seemed fragile even when they first met, and now he has been weakened to the point where his glamour only half hides his true nature: human, hazel eyes look out from a green faces dusted with freckles and a curtain of ginger hair shot through with crimson.

He’s all of twelve years old, broken and in pain, but what does that matter? She is ten, people have died at her hands. Age is of little meaning to them. Besides, he seems to still be alive.

“He isn’t dead.” sing-songs a sharp voice in confirmation, and a man with black hair and all-white eyes and antlers coming jaggedly out of his neatly styled locks steps into her view. He wears a coat of black fox skins that stir helplessly when they see her – neither dead or alive, she realises, and wonders if that is what he has done to the little siren on the ground.

“Oh, no,” he laughs, answering the question she didn’t bother to voice. “No, no. He’s far too nice a thing to just _kill_ , even if we do have a fun game of chase with him now and then.”

The antlered man is wearing knee-high leather heels, and when he disdainfully nudges Jehan with the toe of one the boy whimpers, as if only then he becomes aware of his surroundings.

“I’m going to make him my pet,” continues the antlered man. “Once he’s old enough. I like mortal pets, little thing, but they grow uninteresting so quickly. He will do.”

She – the dream her, anyway – inclines her head gratefully in acknowledgement of her mercy.

“What is your name, my king?”

“Prince, only,” he sighs. “More’s the pity.”

And then, “Montparnasse.”

The name rings with such power that the nature of the dream, or the vision, or whatever, bends around it, so that the earth stops turning and the moon and all the stars begin to orbit him, this dark, sharp-edged man with bloodied antlers and hot-pink, kinky boots.

It’s a true name.

Her using it should be able to hold him to her will, make him do whatsoever she pleases, but such is the power that he radiates that it seems the other way around. Cosette is in thrall to him, just as the other assembled Unseelie and Jehan are.

When he raises one artfully limp wrist and dismisses her with just a flick of his arrogant fingers, she wakes.

Because she is feeling benevolent (if the Unseelie Prince can be merciful, then so can she, if only because she knows his mercy balances on a knife-edge and his patience for her with it, and showing him reverence does no harm to anybody), that morning she is kinder to Papa. He very sensibly does not try and demand that she go to school, and she sits crosslegged on the kitchen table, painting her dolls to make them fae while he fires questions at her.

“You knew that boy, didn’t you? The one that went missing.” he asks as she fills in Barbie’s eyes indigo.

“He’s not a boy.”

When he glances up at her – oh, the lines of Papa’s face are carved so deep, he is so weary – she recites a news headline very easily attributed to Jehan.

“ ‘Five dead in horrific crash, driver thought to have been unexpectedly distracted at mountain pass’.”

“He did that?”

“He has such a pretty voice.”

“ _Has?_ ”

“They took him to the woods.”

Because he’s her papa, and he’s smart, he doesn’t ask any more that. He doesn’t flinch when she begins to sing anymore, either.

“ _Come away, oh human child, to the waters and the wild; with a faerie, hand in hand,_ ”

Perhaps Papa thinks of Euphrasie’s mother now. Hears her voice, sees her smile. Or remembers holding her daughter at her funeral. Which is maybe why he always tries to cover his ears when she sings the last line.

“ _For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand._ ”


	3. The Unseelie Girl

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eponine and Cosette deal with the Tholomyes of this fic. Because he's a douche.

Cosette grows up quickly. Not in a vertical sense, not particularly, but by the time she is fourteen she knows the ins and outs of everything in her town.

She knows where the Unseelie Prince likes to go dancing, and she knows how to block out the music for Papa when that happens (Jehan’s music, it must be, for when it plays people are found wandering around the streets with no memory of how they got there the next day). She knows the bridges that have trolls underneath them, and the rivers where nymphs swim. She knows which shopkeepers can provide harmless little spells under the desk – a bit of Luck for an exam, a shot of Confidence for being in crowds – and which ones deal in significantly less harmless venoms. Meant to be used as antivenins, they all claim, because pixie bites sting like a bitch. She’s not convinced, but that doesn’t mean the poisons aren’t useful.

Of the human comings and goings, of course, she knows little. They don’t really matter- apart from when they disappear, and isn’t that ironic?

When she’s fourteen, she goes to a human party for the first time. No one’s ever invited her before. Probably no one would have invited her to this one, had she not gone digging on the computer of a teacher of hers and found emails detailing a few very nasty things he was planning to do with a student in her class. Both he and the man he was sending them to ended up ‘shooting themselves’ by the river, because, really, she generally tries to ignore the humans’ disgusting little habits but even for them that’s above and beyond.

The student in question, a very quiet girl named Azelma, is so grateful that she offers Cosette her ‘plus one’ place as a thank you. However much she tries to turn it down, Azelma insists.

“You can protect me,” she begs, tagging along with Cosette as they walk home from school. Cosette considers taking a path through the willow grove and seeing how friendly Azelma is after a few of Montparnasse’s games, but dismisses the thought. What’s the point in saving her life just to dispose of her later?

“Be my guardian angel.”

“I’m not an angel.” she snaps back.

“I want to introduce you to my cousin.”

“You barely know me.”

“She’s like you.”

Cosette whirls around at that. Not being overly bothered by the continued existence of a shy teenage girl is one thing, but letting anyone with dangerous information live is beyond the code she doesn’t have and wouldn’t hold to anyway.

“What do you mean?!”

“What? Nothing! Just that...” Azelma look a little frightened, just for a moment. “She’s strange, and unsociable, and she makes things happen sometimes. No one thinks it’s her, but they know it, really. We all know it.”

Cosette smiles. It’s been a while since she met another changeling.

“I’ll come to your party.”

*

She _loves_ it. Next time, she thinks, she’ll just gatecrash, maybe throw a little glamour around so no one notices. This is wonderful – the bright, flashing lights, the loud music that drowns out even the bells in Cosette’s head, so many people intoxicated with nothing but atmosphere. Of course, some of them have got a little alcohol or something more running through their system, but that is only to be expected of humans. She’s sure that she could get them something more powerful if they wanted it, actually, entertain herself with the way they go insane (‘ _We must not speak to goblin men, we must not buy their fruits’,_ what good advice).

The changeling girl is easily spotted. Azelma, hanging around the edges of the dancefloor and smiling at some boy, doesn’t even need to introduce her. Arched features, brown skin, goddamn perfect hair, makeup and glitter thrown around like she’s longing for scales.

Being teenagers, all the human boys (and a good number of the girls) are practically hanging off of her, but when Cosette allows herself to be drawn closer the girl happily pulls her in.

“You’re waiting for a really drunk one,” she laughs, right into the other girl’s ear. “Right? So when they’re found everyone’ll just think their crazy story is the alcohol speaking.”

“I don’t just want to mess with them, faerie,” rejoins the girl, just as easily. “I’m not _you_. My kind just kill them every now and again, barely any psychological torture necessary.”

“Who are you?”

“I’m Jondrette’s daughter.”

“Who were you before you were that?”

“Eponine.”

The beat of the music intensifies, and for a moment there can be no talking over the delighted screams of the other kids.

“And who are you, little thing? They talk about you in the woods.”

“Cosette Fauchelevant.”

That earns her a curious head tilt.

“You take a human’s name?”

“Why not?”

Eponine shrugs, very audibly saying ‘your choice, I couldn’t care less’. And then she grins sharply.

“That one.”

The boy she means, when she raises her finger to point, is the very image of youthful human foolishness. His hair is perfectly styled and perfectly fashionable, his clothes faux street couture and very expensive, his smile sneering and confident, his steps haunted by braying lackeys. Cosette hisses like a cat.

“Oh, he’s wronged you?” laughs Eponine.

“He mocks the fair folk.”

Well, he laughs when she passes in the hallway, sends his minions over to ask her on dates as some puerile joke. It’s not really something she understands, but he deserves punishment more than anyone else in her eyeshot.

“Tear him into little pieces,” she implores, mock-pouting cutely. “Make him hurt, then make him go away.”

“I’ll make the bad kid go away.” nods Eponine kindly, and puts her hands to Cosette’s chin and her cheek to pull her into a quick, breathless kiss. “Follow my lead, little thing.”

Cosette’s first kiss is with another changeling, in the middle of a crowded dancefloor, both of them drunk on raw emotion. It’s so much more fun than anything has been for a long time, and so when she does obediently follow it’s almost blindly.

As she walks, Eponine completely transforms. The easy beauty and happiness she radiated while dancing twists and changes entirely, an almost perceptible aura of allure growing around her with every swaying step she takes towards her hapless victim. Cosette is joined with her by the hand, their pinkies interlinked, and she has to half skip to keep up with those confident strides but she doesn’t mind.

“His name is Felix Tholomyes.” she whispers, just as they reach him.

Neither of them quite reach his head-height, but it doesn’t matter. He coughs on his drink anyway, caught up in Eponine’s eyes as she smiles slowly at him. Cosette’s expression is far more dangerous – she is not smiling, she is baring her teeth as a wolf might, saying ‘beware’ to a human who is too stupid to hear. Tholomyes is entranced by the minutiae of her fingers moving her bangles, of her long eyelashes and the shifting of her hips.

“Hey!” Eponine says, somehow weighty despite the fact she has been standing here scant seconds, and she drags the word out. “It’s Felice, right?”

“Felix.”

“Oh, right-” She doesn’t seem to care that he corrects her, and Cosette delights at Tholomyes’s flush. “Well. I’m ‘Ponine Jondrette. Cosette is, like, my BBF. Like, we do everything together.”

He frowns, slipping away from the spell for a moment and distracted by the way that Cosette’s breaths come quickly clearly not for him, the way her eyes are fixed almost unerringly on Eponine.

“Cosette? We’ve got classes together, you-”

“Oh, I know she’s not your kind of girl,” laughs Eponine lightly. Her acting is flawless. This flirty, shallow of her seems just as real as the sly changeling searching for amusement. “But she likes to stick with me, you know? We don’t go to the same school, so when we get a chance we have to do literally, literally everything. Together.”

She brushes a finger against his chest, and finally, finally her message seems to penetrate his thick skull.

“ _Fuck_. No way!”

“Yes, way. Don’t you want to go somewhere quiet, Felice?”

This time he doesn’t even bother to correct her, nodding fervently.

“Come along, little thing.” she tells Cosette again, and takes Tholomyes’s hand with her free one.

The path she leads them on, away from the noise of the house the party is being held in, is trodden by hooves and meanders in a way that seems meaningless down the riverside. Her steps are quick and sure, and by the time Tholomyes comes to his senses and begins to wonder where they are, they’re too far from civilisation for anyone to save him.

“Wait,” he calls, squinting against the undiluted darkness. “Where the fuck are we? I thought you said-”

“I didn’t say anything.” smiles Eponine, and only Cosette can see it happening but her hair begins to knot together and turn green, hard, slimy. “You misunderstood.”

Tholomyes might not be able to see without the light of the streetlamps they have long passed out of the territory of, but even he can hear the way that her voice begins to change. It is huskier, deep, and Cosette can hear his heart thumping fearfully underneath Eponine’s words. His face turns pale and drawn with terror. When he glances over his shoulder at Cosette’s laughter and sees her eyes, those black eyes that reflect no light, he yells and makes to flee.

Too late. It is not sneakered feet that hit the ground when Eponine gives chase, but rather hooves, so dark an emerald that they gleam like ravens’ wings with the moonlight. Her hair is a mane of seaweed, her eyes glinting with intelligent hunger. There’s no doubt at all in Cosette that Eponine is Unseelie now, for what Seelie fae would appreciate the beauty in this creature? They wrap themselves up in all that consider beautiful, and yet they would never see the elegance of these jagged ribs that show through the stretched skin of her flank, the mossy fur, the fangs in place of what should be a horse’s teeth. She is stunning. Morbidly so.

The best part about watching is that Cosette can see the mistake Tholomyes makes even as he’s making it. He thinks he’s being so smart, pausing for a moment in his scrambles to get away to try and grab her mane and flip over her.

Eponine grins, a razor’s edge, and she plunges into the river with him still on her back. She has gills like knife slits in her throat, so she can breathe underwater.

He can’t.

Even Cosette can’t continue to giggle at that. It’s beautiful, but somehow ugly, and when Eponine resurfaces with mottled, seal-like skin and her hair still green all that she can do is stare is horrid fascination.

Eponine, drenched in stagnant water and looking more like a dark pagan goddess than fae or human, stalks out of the shallows and over to Cosette. Their kiss this time could not really be described as either pleasant or _un_ pleasant, just filled with raw emotion and what she thinks must be pure power radiating off the other girl. Her lips taste like algae and blood in turns.

“You’re sweet, Cosette,” sighs Eponine, with her webbed hands still on Cosette’s face and her voice still rough. “But you should go home. ‘Zelma won’t mind. Besides, you’ll need an alibi.”

For once, she does as she’s told, and runs.

*

Getting home is easy. No one tries to stop her, no one sees anything but a slightly upset petite teenager in a party dress, a girl with roses braided into her hair. It’s a nice dress too, which makes it all the more shame when she has to reach behind herself and rip a gash in it to make way for her wings. She hasn’t got the patience to deal with Papa tonight, so instead she just flutters up to her window and climbs inside.

(Flying is somehow something she just knows, without ever learning. It makes her ask herself how old, how wise she was before they sent her to live with Valjean; if she _did_ have to learn but she was so used to it by that time that it seems natural to her now, or if she was a child after all and it is natural.)

Her bed she forms into a nest of blankets and burrows to the centre, untangling the roses from her head and sending them growing around her into a wall of thorns. It’s a message straight out of a fairytale: _Keep out: magic sleeps here, and you will face its wrath if you wake it._

Eponine is like her. Not fragile, not like Jehan. Not Seelie. So why is this feeling of wrongness, of uncertainty, haunting her? She doesn’t understand, and she hates not understanding. It makes her want to _scream_.

Rather than doing that – and bringing Papa running, because even after all this time he still can’t bring himself to believe that she isn’t as delicate as she seems – she sleeps as deeply as the storybook princess she has walled herself in like.

She dreams of an underwater court in the local lake, too black with pollution to feed into the reservoir, of mermaids in bikinis and selkies lounging around to the singing of freshwater sirens. Scaled faeries laugh as they sense her presence and her confusion.

 _You are of the earth,_ they explain, breath like bubbles. _You don’t belong here. See?_

All of a sudden she is drowning, her lungs are filling with water and her hair is plastered to her scalp, her clothes are a dead weight and her wings are too heavy to move-

And she wakes, choking on the air she breathes and with the interminable bells discordant in her ears.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (The 'goblin men' line is from Christina Rosetti)


	4. The Solitary Fae

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cosette against the city, and all the fae that are to be found there - Gavroche, Claquesous, Grantaire, Enjolras, Feuilly, Bahorel, and surprisingly, a certain Seelie poet...

Papa is getting worse.

It was always inevitable, really. That first night that he realised what she is, he cried. And then as she got older and more powerful (and more easily bored), he spent more and more time in church, searching for absolution of some unspecified sin.

The next morning after the party, he is waiting for her with an ashen face and a fresh newspaper. When she goes to her tiptoes and kisses his cheek as she passes, he doesn’t respond.

“Cosette,” he ventures eventually. The picture splashed across of the newspaper is of Tholomyes’s body, strewn face-down on the riverbank and torn at as though by an animal, covered in water and blood. “You were at this party, weren’t you?”

“Don’t look at me like that,” she tells him, gently. “It wasn’t me.”

“Then what-”

“An animal, or something.” she lies quickly. “A wild horse. Or maybe he drowned and then a fox got to him.”

“Mm.”

He’s not convinced, but then again he doesn’t have to be. If he tries to tell anybody about her, her true nature, he’ll be... disposed of, but while he remains loyal then she’ll allow him to live. It’s quite nice, the thought of having people loyal and obedient to her. She’ll have to think on it further some other time – many faeries keep mortal pets, after all.

“I just don’t want you to get hurt.” he mumbles. He has not been young for a long time, and the stress of a child like Cosette has aged him prematurely, making him seem fragile and elderly.

Cosette inclines her head like a bird, considering him with pity. “Oh, Papa.”

For a moment, it seems as though Valjean is going to turn the conversation to something mundane and ordinary and safe, but then he looks at her face and gasps.

“Cosette, your eyes!”

Ah, that. It’s a nuisance.

“It’s the glamour,” she explains in annoyance, blinking them back to blue where black had begun to spread over them.

“What?”

“The magic that makes me look this way, Papa. The spell is too old, it’s falling apart.” She bends down to examine her face in the microwave, then look back to him. “I won’t stay here once it’s gone completely, you know.”

“Where will you go?” he croaks in shock.

“The city. Iron burns, but I can survive it.”

“What will you do there?!”

“Seek out the Solitary Fae.”

He doesn’t understand, but he, her clever, clever papa, knows at least to stop asking questions.

It’s not like can stop her, anyway. It happens when she’s seventeen, and can feel the spell stretched tight over her bones, ready to snap at any moment. She leaves a note for him – just one word, _Goodbye_ , because she knows she’s never coming back – and she dances with the Unseelie the night before to say farewell to them too.

Montparnasse laughs at her, lifts her when she leaps so that her wings can hold her aloft and she can curiously brush her fingers over his glorious antlers.

“You may see me,” he promises, bearing her down and twirling her too and fro. “In the city. It’s all so shiny and new and filthy- I love it. Many a man has found himself dying for his shiny little trinket there, and not all of them at my hands. We can so easily hide.”

“I want to find the free folk there.” she explains dizzily. Cosette will never be tall, but now that she is seventeen she has the proportions of an adult, at least, and her hair has grown long enough to wear over her shoulder in a plait like Jehan used to. ‘Parnasse didn’t mention it but for the tightening of his lips in disapproval at her silent daring.

“Don’t you go colluding to treachery with me.” he teases, then spins her so that she goes reeling out of his hold, through the trees, and suddenly, out of the woods all together.

She snatches a few hours of sleep, writes her note, and slips away with nothing more than a backpack full of clothes and scraps of paper enchanted to hold the appearance of money. Leprechaun gold is outdated, after all.

Her train ticket is charmed out of the man at the booth with a smile and a little laugh at his compliments. Almost before she knows it, she is away.

*

Cosette has nowhere to stay here. Nobody to turn to, nothing to see, nothing to do. The sensation isn’t frightening at all, just exciting, and in her mind the bells pick up a new tune that she’s never heard before.

 _Find R_ , suggests a voice among the bells that she doesn’t recognise. _R will show you all kinds of pretty things._

“Who’s R?” she says aloud, and gets some funny glances from the humans passing her on the sidewalk. They all seem so busy. Barely anyone pauses to look carefully at anything, which she supposes is a good thing because there’s an elfin-featured boy with pointed ears darting between them and lifting bits of money or other valuables from their pockets and their bags before periodically heading back to the underside of a bridge. He seems worried.

Curiously, she does her best to look like a human tourist, eyes wide and fingers tapping the camera of her phone (not really a phone. A stone, glamoured into one). Sure enough, the boy is lured in – and then freezes with shock when she grabs his wrist.

“No mortals see me!” he protests, almost to himself. “Too clever for that, I am, too clever by ‘arf-”

“Stop talking.” she orders mildly. “What’s your name?”

“Can’t say if I can’t talk, can I?”

“Just tell me.”

“Call me Gavroche.” he huffs, moodily. “E’ryone else does. An’ I’m a sprite and all, ‘fore you go asking that too.”

“I’m Cosette.” she offers in return. It’s something of a peace offering, and if the way that Gavroche relaxes at it means anything, he understands.

“You a faerie?” he asks, squinting up at her. “You look like you might be.”

“Yep.”

“Nice. So, whaddayowant?”

He speaks in a thick _patois_ , a dialect of city slang that seems somehow both outdated and appallingly modern. It’s barely understandable, but out of his little mouth is almost charming.

“Information.” she explains as he glances back anxiously at the bridge he’d been heading to.

“Info, right. And what’ll you offer me for it? I don’t do charity, lady.”

“Tell me first what’s under the bridge.”

He doesn’t seem to count that as information, instead beginning to fidget and bounce nervously on the spot.

“That? Oh, that? Nothing, that ain’t nothin’.” he mumbles, far too quickly. “Just a troll or two, p’rhaps.”

“The truth, Gavroche.”

“Alright, maybe it’s an Ellefolket.” he continues, not so much as pausing for breath. “A scary old Edda-thing. Hollow Folk, I heard ‘em called, ‘cause they’re missing bits. This guy, Claquesous, he wears a mask and underneath it there isn’t nothing but a big empty space that he uses to eat up little sprites who don’t do anythin’ to him ‘cept maybe tease him a little...”

He stares up at her, big eyes imploring.

“He’s got my little brothers. Pair of sprites, ‘bout knee high on you, Miss. Says he’s gonna eat them if I don’t get enough money for him to get takeout instead.”

Sprites are foolish things, not particularly malicious but easily bored. Humans might wake up with their hair knotted to their headboard one morning, or their pants might drop down in public, or they might find their wallets missing. Nothing they’d automatically lay at the door of the supernatural, anyway – while the supernatural themselves often enough find themselves tripping over tiny, impish little things with a habit of trading in actually valuable enchanted items for mass-produced human baubles. Whoever this Claquesous fae is, he’s performing what some might call pest control.

But Cosette can’t quite resist the urge to mess about anyway.

“I’ll get them back for you,” she says to Gavroche, idly considering how hard it would be to kill a creature with no eyes, and then sternly adds. “But you have to show me where to find the Solitary Fae. Do you know anybody named R?”

“Sure, sure,” he cackles. “‘ _Aire Majuscule_ ’. We know him, we can bring you to him. We can show you the best spot to ambush him from, if you’d like.”

Smiling sweetly, she releases the boy’s wrist and cracks her knuckles. She’s always found Hollow Folk to be more repulsive than sprites, anyway.

*

The bar that Gavroche leads her to, before he and his brothers disappear again into the night, is dingy and small. She had genuinely expected to find other fae in crowded nightclubs, places with excited atmospheres as infectious as that ill-fated party’s had been, but she had been a fool. This place all but reeks of magic, and the atmosphere is both wonderful and horrible, saying _here is a place where you might drink yourself unconscious, only to wake and find that a century has passed as you slept._ The sign has been blackened by the dirt and carbon in the air until what it used to say is pretty much illegible – The Wolf and Dog? The Wharf and Hog? – and she can smell the rot of the wooden door from metres away, even before she touches it. Inside, it stinks of all the poisons humans just love to cultivate (tobacco, alcohol, cannabis, all and the same to Cosette, she knows that she can’t have any without throwing up) and sweat, but she can’t bring herself to care. In the furthermost booth is a man gently plucking a pitifully battered guitar to the bells’ new song, and she smiles, for when he senses her approach and glances up his eyes are unearthly: yellow as a cats, and with diamond pupils.

“R.”

“That is my name, lark.” he grins, and his teeth are yellow and crooked. When she looks more closely, she can see that they are filed to sharp little points. “How have you heard of it?”

“Just little birds whispering.” says Cosette vaguely. She’s still standing in the middle of the floor, but the people in the bar – maybe not all _people_ , exactly: there is a red-haired man laughing in the brown arms of his boyfriend in the corner, only the red-haired man has gingery goat legs that he’s not bothering to even try and conceal, and his boyfriend’s arms aren’t merely brown but bear the same texture as bark, his thick dreadlocks wound through with ivy – don’t seem to care in the slightest.

He brushes dark curls out of his eyes and shifts forwards, onto his elbows, then leans his guitar against his booth.

“Come sit with me, lark. Come and talk to me.”

She does as he says, wrinkling her nose at the chemical scent that comes curdling from his glass and into the smoky air. He downs it all at once and shakes his head in disgust – clearly he doesn’t like it any more than she does, but he drinks it anyway. Curious.

“Absinthe, I find,” he conspiratorially informs her, coughing. “Rather mimics the favour of faerie liquors. And the effects, come to think of it.”

“Then why do you pursue it?”

“Exhaustion. And amusement.”

“ _‘We were very tired, we were very merry’_ ,” recites Cosette, humming out what she thinks she might like as a tune to it.

“Have you gone back and forth all night on the ferry?”

“The train.”

“Ah.”

She watches curiously as he traces a cursive letter ‘R’ carved deep into the wood of the table. There’s no mystery at all as to how it got there, not when the fingernail he uses to do so is thick and sharply curled. More a talon than a nail.

“I was told that you could show me pretty things.” At the sideways frown he shoots her, she explains a little further. “The birds again, unfortunately.”

“So the name ‘Lark’ is apt, then?” he says, forcing his good humour noticeably. “I had only called you that because you are so small.”

“I don’t mind.”

“Keep your real name to yourself.” he advises. “I go by R because it’s safer that way, not just for the sake of a pun.”

He rubs his hands together, shaking himself out of his misery like a dog might shake off water. “So, what kind of pretty things do you want to see? I paint, lark, that’s most likely why your little birds thought I’d know what to show you.”

She shrugs, content for a while to watch him, and he shifts uncomfortably under her gaze. Her eyes have slipped to black again, as have her lips, but she doesn’t care.

“Have you seen _mon_ _ange_?” he asks eventually, nodding towards the bar. “He is pretty indeed. Apollo!”

From one of the stools, a young man with golden blonde hair and what appears to be sparkling skin glances over his shoulder, shakes his head in exasperation at R, and turns back to his passionate argument with what can only be a goblin.

“My lover is a pesky piskie.” sighs R. His voice is full of longing, but of satisfaction too. “Beautiful, charming, and utterly terrible. I admired him from afar for decades, but then good fortune, he chanced to look back at such an ugly bastard as myself.”

“Fickle is a pixie’s favour.”

“Not this one. Apollo has the longest memory of any fae I’ve ever met, pixie or otherwise.” He chuckles harshly. “Have you ever heard of the June Rebellion? It still irks him.”

Cosette hasn’t, but doesn’t bother to ask. The pixie is beautiful, yes, but he doesn’t interest her. She wants pretty things to herself.

When she voices this, R appraises her more curiously.

“Do you know a faerie,” he chances eventually. “By the name of ‘Parnasse?”

“Yes, of course. Montparnasse. He’s the Unseelie Prince.”

R jumps at the use of Montparnasse’s full name – outside of a dream world it doesn’t quite have the same power that it did the first time she heard it, but it is still powerful. Besides, he won’t even accept given names, too worried about their power. He seems to feel a visceral terror at the sound of a true one.

“Fuck, don’t say that!” he hisses, hunching his shoulders up like an animal trying to defend itself. “You can’t just-”

All that Cosette does is blink calmly at him, and he bites off another oath before he forces himself to continue shakily.

“Yeah, well. If you know ‘Parnasse, you might know his little poet over there.”

Steeling himself for another swig of the foul liquid, R gestures with his bottle as he brings it to his lips. She follows to where he means, just at the same table as the ginger faun and what she thinks is a dryad, far away from his tree, and narrows her eyes sceptically, because surely the man he means isn’t...

Jehan. In a hideously floral sweater that doesn’t come anywhere near to hiding a line of what might be hickeys but might equally be bruises up his neck, knee high socks and neon sneakers, and his hair loose around his shoulders. Like the others in the bar, he wears no glamour. Just lounges in his chair with all the glory of his green and crimson self.

Out of the corner of her eye, Cosette glimpses R’s lover begin towards them. She doesn’t care. Instead, she stands and half-runs, half-floats over to the siren, unable to control her wings with the intensity of her emotion.

“Jehan!”

His eyes fix to her far too quickly, and she stops in her tracks. They are clouded.

It’s not to the point of blindness, clearly, but nor is _that_ simply the after-effects of drunkenness. He almost seems to flinch back from her, stares hard and thoughtfully for a moment, and then finally, finally, comes to a realisation.

“Cosette, it’s you!”

 _What enchantment must he be under?_ she wonders as she accepts his fragile embrace. _Or is it just the result of many years of heavy spells being piled on him, over and over? Has his magic faded from him? Has his **sense**?_

“Jehan,” murmurs the faun cautiously, up from his boyfriend’s lap and poised to the defensive. “Are you okay? Where do you know her from?”

“Oh, she’s Unseelie.” he laughs nervously, and the dryad is suddenly on his feet too.

“Step away from him.” the dryad instructs her. His voice is a low rumble, like the creaking of trees in the wind or the coming of an earthquake.

Cosette does no so such thing. She may have been raised among humans, but there is a certain ingrained sense of pride in her that makes her stand her ground, shoulders squared.

“I’m not hurting him. And what business is it of yours, Free Folk?”

“They call us free for a reason.” snaps the faun. “Unseelie means nothing here, alright? So if you don’t want a fight, then-”

“No, no,” objects Jehan quietly. “She’s not like Him.”

 _Him_. Him with a capital ‘H’ audible even in speech patterns; no need to ask who He is. They aren’t religious, anyway, so there’s no mistaking Jehan’s fearful reverence for faith. Not for the first time, she wonders whether it would have been better for the poor thing if Montparnasse had never shown any ‘mercy’ in the first place and simply taken Jehan’s head, as he had threatened to.

At least Jehan seems to have found some temporary protection among these Solitary few.

“Cosette, this is Feuilly-” (the faun, who still hasn’t backed down) “- and Bahorel-” (the big dryad, who nods politely.) “Feuilly and Bahorel – Cosette.”

“I was a changeling.” she explains briefly. “We were almost the same age.”

Neither of them seem quite sure, which is good. Friends as loyal as these are hard to come by in a people who are treacherous by their very nature, who can’t help to play mischief and deal in betrayal any more than they can help to breathe. Reason, it has been said, is strong in mortals but weak in faeries. Only the fact that magic is weak in the former but strong in the latter seems to make up for it.

“I trust you, Jehan,” she says to him, suddenly crafty. He numbly allows her to touch her face, although he doesn’t seem exactly happy with it: in the years he has spent with Montparnasse, kindness will have been in short supply. “Don’t you trust me?”

“I-” he stammers, then averts his eyes. “Of c-course.”

“Tell me first why you’re here, then?”

When she takes his seat and brushes his time-stained notepads out of the way (they are filled with his spidery handwriting, with what looks like poetry but could just as easily be a shopping list, and has notes to himself in an imaginary language scribbled up and down the margin) he doesn’t object.

“If you spend a year and a day in the city, you’re free of your masters.” says Bahorel. “It’s an old law, from feudalism, but the Courts still keep it.”

“I ran.” giggles Jehan, somewhat hysterically. “He sent his dogs after me, but they didn’t catch me. No, no, no. I ran away.”

Feuilly gently rubs his shoulders, hushing him down from what could be quite an ugly fit.

“Alright.” she says, just as gently. “How long have you been here, then?”

He holds up five fingers, then folds one down again.

“About four and a half months,” Feuilly translates, still holding him.

Perhaps she should tell them that Montparnasse often visits the city. That he likes it there, and that he most likely has informers scattered all over the place in the same way that he did back in the little town that Cosette grew up in. That there’s almost certainly nowhere safe for them here.

But then again, perhaps it’s none of her business. She shouldn’t interfere in the affairs of others, after all – if Jehan and his friends are smart enough to stay hidden for eight more months, then they escape the wrath of the antlered man. If they aren’t, then Montparnasse’s particular flavour of justice will descend on them like an avalanche.

“I won’t trouble you any longer,” she tells him sweetly. Bahorel and Feuilly seem reassured by it, and she almost laughs at their naivety. The Solitary Fae are more human than their wild, courtly cousins, it seems: they drink as humans do, they love as humans do, they think that there is honesty to be found in the promises of a faerie. “All I’m looking for is a bit of fun.”

“There’s a club,” says Bahorel slowly. He and Feuilly exchange a look that tells her exactly what they think of it. “We don’t go there.”

“It’s the kind of place where mortals disappear, you know? They go in, eat the pomegranate seeds, and no one hears from them ever again.”

“I can look after myself.”

It’s not her that they’re worried about, and she knows it – and they should very well be worried for any humans she encounters there. The bells tremble excitedly in her head at the promise of blood.

“Give me the address,” she asks as they hesitate to do so. “I won’t tell anyone you’re here, and I won’t come back again.”

(Like she said: it’s none of her business. For all that anyone knows she was never here.)

Jehan’s unfocused eyes are staring off somewhere distant, and his friends are still clearly unsure of her. Feuilly is red to the goat horns that just about poke out from his hair, apparently angry. Bahorel just frowns thoughtfully, considering every detail.

“I swear it on my name.”

That is a powerful oath. Her name means things to her, shows the life she has spent. _Cosetta_ , for her height, for her individual identity; _Euphrasie_ , for the precious life she has stolen; _Fauchelevant_ , for her poor, dear Papa. Beyond on those three words, though, are even more. _Lark_ , for a disguise and for her appearance; and her _real_ name, the name that holds the key to her soul, that she doesn’t know but might have done before they sent her wandering out of the forest to be Cosette.

Accepting at last, they nod.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (The poetry that Cosette and Grantaire quote at each other is 'Recuerdo' by Edna St. Vincent Millay)


	5. The Human Boy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cosette, Courfeyrac, Musichetta, and their humans.

She does not go straight there that night. Irrespective of the darkness she knows is here, senses vaguely with every alleyway she passes, the city seems a palace of lights to her. Never mind the honeyish, glowing puddles that spill like treacle from the streetlamps – she can see by them, yes, and they bare all the secrets of the night to even laughably weak human vision, but they are not what interests her. Strips of neon snakes coil around every available surface, entrancing, and no one even seems to notice when she flicks her finger and makes them writhe, giving birth to sparks that fly like fireflies off into the velvety indigo of the sky and die before they have a chance to do anything but shine. Lighter flames and the ends of lit cigarettes snatch at the edge of her vision, leaving images of themselves on the back of her eyelids that fade and contort with time as memories might. No matter that the stars are not visible here; they do not need to be. The mortals have made their own stars, so bright that night bows out to day. With every electric bulb left on in every window, every restaurant open twenty four hours, the darkness seems to flee.

It reminds her poignantly of being younger, and leaning down to pick up a pencil in class, and realising that the world seems so different upside down. The world above her desk was the torsos and heads of everyone, of the top half of her teacher, and yet here was a completely foreign world of brightly coloured children’s shoes and table legs and all the books on the bottom shelves.

She likes it so much that she goes stumbling gleefully into a hotel and hands over booklets and notepad pages and leaves as ‘money’ until they exchange it all for a tiny, shiny little room key, and she laughs dizzily to herself for the whole duration that she is in the elevator. Lower bells sound booming in her mind, a call to arms or feast that sets her heart to race away with her.

Once she is at the penthouse, she ignores the room completely to force the lock – there is a key in her hand, yes, but who could concentrate on semantics like that at a time like this- and run to the balcony.

Cosette is grinning like a madwoman, but she can’t bring herself to change anything. Below her the city is spread out like a starcloth from a theatre. It is so _beautiful_.

No matter if she doesn’t sleep that night, anyway. Who needs sleep? She switches on every light in the place and throws open every drape as a beacon to the world, saying ‘I am AWAKE’, and dances around the room as though her feet are enchanted.

*

Much to her surprise, the club is open in the daytime. It doesn’t stink of metaphorical fairy-dust in the same way that R’s bar did, but if she had been focused enough to come here last night she doesn’t doubt that she would have found some deranged fae’s attempt at Xanadu. _This way to Eden_ proclaim iron letters fixed deep into the wall where bricks have been removed and moss allowed to grow around them. Iron and religion. Irony and humour, to a faerie, and bait for a human – it’s not even a well-maintained disguise, for the fire-escape steps down to ‘Eden’s’ entrance are bronze and therefore safe for fae to touch.

The Musain, as the flower-dotted sign over the door tells her it is called, may be open, but it is deserted. The walls are wooden and carved into stories that she vaguely recognises on sight: Grimm Fairytales, or stories from the Iliad, or the Edda. The metal limbs of any tables twist into the shape of woodland creatures. The ceiling is painted to resemble a dawn.

Whoever owns this place is pining to return to their Court. They must come from a forest like Cosette, because if there was ever a big enough tree then this club seems as though it might be found nestling in the roots of it. Everything except the streamer-strewn dancefloor and the polished oak (but defiantly modern) bar could have wandered straight out of Hans Christian Anderson.

“Are you looking for something?” asks a clear voice, and when she glances over her shoulder there is a young man with wild curls and bright eyes standing there with his hands in his pockets. He is wearing a bowtie and a waistcoat apparently completely unironically, and such is the confidence in his bearing that the look doesn’t immediately crash and burn on him. As she thinks this, he in his turn glances up and down her appreciatively.

“I like the Tinkerbell thing you’ve got going on.” he nods. It’s funny to think that she has dressed so like such a ridiculous children’s character – in all but her volatile emotions, really, Barrie could have done better than to deceive so many generations into finding faeries lovable – but the green dress she is wearing and her untidy pile of blonde hair does maybe give that impression.

“Thank you.”

Amused and still surveying her, he begins to weave through the tables towards her. The expression on his face is of the curiously delighted kind that tugs at the mouths of small children and certain fae at any sign of possible encroaching mischief, and it makes her wonder. He’s far too tall to be a sprite, far too humanoid for an imp. A pooka, perhaps?

“My name is-” he begins again, only to be cut off as a rather tall human comes tumbling out of a side door after him. Clad in only his boxers, the man is Asian, lithe and pleasantly muscular, with beautiful astronomical tattoos that come curling up his forearms and pair of square glasses skewed forwards on his nose.

“Courf,” cries the man, utterly perplexed and clinging desperately to the arm that’s in his reach, as though it is a rock in stormy seas. ‘Courf’ spun towards him but doesn’t seem particularly alarmed. “I thought- When I woke up- you weren’t there, I-”

“Shh, it’s okay,” hushes the fae, calm and in control. “I wouldn’t leave you, ‘Ferre. You know that, don’t you? Come on now, it’s okay. Go and sit at the table there.”

The man is still stumbling about in confusion, but the reassurances of his lover seem to have comforted him so much that, completely unself-conscious of his state of undress, ‘Ferre’ sits down just as he’s told. As Cosette watches, he begins to eat hungrily from a bowl of what is most certainly not normal fruit – black-skinned apples with silver flesh, golden grapes that seem to bleed out when punctured.

“I’m Courfeyrac.” he continues, unruffled, and offers her a little bow seemingly in apology for the interruption. “And you must forgive my pet; he’s still unused to fae.”

“Your pet?”

Cosette inclines her head in wonder. Of course, it is so obvious what the situation here is now that she gives it any thought at all, but how Jehan had seemed is so sharply different from how this clingy, satisfied human seems.

“He whispers the names and legends of the constellations in my ears,” grins Courfeyrac, as wide as the Cheshire Cat and as capricious too. “We lie on the roof and he whispers them to me, and he marvels at magic on an atomic level. He’s sweet.”

“Where did you find him?”

“University student.” shrugs Courfeyrac as he pours himself a drink of something that’s been left out on the table. The bottle it comes from is an old one, vaseline glass that no one produces anymore. By the look of it, the contents haven’t been touched since the bottle was fresh. “Astrophysics, he tells me. Believe it or not, _he_ was actually the one who propositioned _me_.”

“I’ve always wanted one,” admits Cosette. “But I’ve never liked a human well enough to make them mine.”

Courf looks up as another yawning (but considerably more relaxed), short young man wanders into the room. He’s dressed in dirty scrubs and brightly coloured socks, no shoes in sight, with glowsticks apparently from last night still clipped around his wrists and his neck. The scrubs – and, come to think of it, his face and hands – look as though they haven’t been washed in a long, long time.

“Well, why stop at just one?” laughs Courfeyrac quietly, coming forwards to ruffle the boy’s hair and make him giggle. “Two’s company, Joly, isn’t that right?”

“Mm huh. Chetta loves Lesgle and me just the same.” he recites drowsily. The words are clearly seared into his jumbled memory: this boy understands nothing more of his situation than Ferre does, has no more power over it than Jehan. There are spells over them, not so powerful as Montparnasse would have had to use to bind a siren, but still weighty.

“See, Musichetta – she owns the place-” _Musichetta_. the name sings in Cosette’s mind with the bellsong, summons half-dreams, half-memories of a nymph slipping in and out of tree branches, untameable and laughing at those who would try. She is not exactly clothed, but neither does she seem naked, at home among the woods and dancing wildly there. Then, later, the vision changes and she is banished among the cold iron burn of the city for some incomprehensible crime, weeping into her arms and cursing the world in its entirety for unjust cruelty.

“-found him outside a hospital at three in the morning. He was an intern there.”

Cosette can see that even more clearly in her mind’s eye – Musichetta, hardened now to cruelty and injustice and human cities, is speaking to her without the need for words.

_The chill and the night, and the student slumped against the wall of his hospital, fumbling with a cigarette that he knows all too well will be the death of him. The glasses that he has apparently lost now flash with sudden brightness, but when he looks up nothing has changed except that there is now a woman standing before him. Her sudden appearance makes him jump._

_“Rough night?”_

_Awkwardly, the man stands. His awkwardness seems partially just that he is dumbfounded in the face of such ethereal beauty, but partially something else, physical. One his feet he leans on a cane – and although, along with his glasses, it is nowhere to be seen now, Cosette is charmed to see that he has painted flames licking up it._

_“I, um... One of the patients passed away today. I mean, he was old, but-”_

_Musichetta clucks her tongue in brittle sympathy. “You poor thing.”_

_She reaches out to gently touch his face as he freezes, caught in her eyes as a deer is caught in headlights. “I can make it all go away.”_

_“Who_ are _you?” he whispers, afraid to break the spell. Like some kind of disappointed kindly relative, she turns away from him and sighs into the cold air. Her breath is a dragon’s icy breath._

_“Oh, questions. Tell me your name first, and I will answer any that you have.”_

_“Joly.”_

_“Your full name.”_

_“Pascal Hao Joly.”_

_When she turns back to him, her eyes are alight with dark joy, and Cosette feels the same thrill go through her at the knowledge that this man has just sealed his doom._

_“Pascal Hao Joly,” she orders, savouring each syllable. “Come with me.”_

_And he is helpless to obey._

_*_

“And the other?” Cosette demands of Courfeyrac, sending his eyebrows up in disbelief.

“You catch on awfully quickly, faerie.”

“Well,” she says craftily. “How would you like me addressing you as Pooka?”

“Maybe if you gave me a name to use, Tinkerbell.” he grumbles, but happily surrenders. “He was a law student. She calls him her ‘Eagle of Meaux’ because that’s where he lived. You know, before.”

*

_Another young man, a cafe. His shaved head gleams bare in the light, he is absentmindedly poking at some toast, and the coffee in front of him has gone cold. The expression on his face is one of melancholy._

_Musichetta, wearing her most human glamour, slips easily into the seat across from him and leans over the table to wink._

_“Let me buy you another one.”_

*

“All of them are students.” she wonders aloud, and gets a noncommittal humming noise from Courfeyrac.

“They don’t have to be. Just easier, that’s all. They’re the most stressed group of people with the least to loose, they’re young, they have terrible relationships with their parents. When they go missing, it’s not usually big news.”

“So you’re saying I should hang around universities.”

“Not necessarily.” He sighs, and she can tell that all he really wants is to get back to Ferre, who by this point is beginning to audibly pine again. “You know, you should come back later. Maybe when ‘Chetta opens up for mortals again, tonight. We’re throwing a party – no holds barred, no bars held, et cetera.”

Cosette shakes her head thoughtfully. Not that the idea isn’t tempting, but something tells her that it isn’t right for her. “No, thank you. I think I’ll find one for myself.”

“Do as you will, Tinkerbell. None of my concern.”

With a gracious inclination of her head and a silent goodbye to the ever-present sensation of being watched that she knows is Musichetta, Cosette turns to go the way she came and slips away.

*

She’s on something of a mission for the next week or so. Delightedly, predatorily, Cosette attends university orchestra concerts, allows overconfident young men to try and chat her up, or generally shyer young women to clumsily flirt. Scores of charming mortals pass before her eyes, in these ten days, but none of them are what she is looking for.

In this time, the inevitable iron sickness gradually manifests. It begins as the buzzing of a headache in the back of her skull, and spreads forwards until she wakes every morning to a zigzag of white hot pain through her head at the first ray of dawn. She’s strong enough to ignore it, but she can tell all too easily how the Solitary Fae are apt to go insane or begin acting so human. And as if the sickness itself isn’t enough, her powers weaken. Casting her glamour every few days becomes a tiresome chore.

It is because of the iron sickness that she is walking in the city park. Humans even cage the trees with steel, but the radiating pulse of modern metal is less concentrated here, and she enjoys the solace. Of course, she is not meant to be in the park at four in the morning. The gates are locked at present – but what matter is that to a creature with wings as beautifully purposeful as hers? Winter is long gone, which only saps further at her strength, and yet the air when it is so dark and early still bites. It reminds her enough of long, frosty nights that happy she almost misses the human altogether.

He is asleep on a park bench.

Here is the place in which she would never have thought to go looking, and there he is nonetheless, curled up with a heavy black coat thrown over him and his head resting on his hands. The strangest thing is that doesn’t seem like the kind of person you would have expected to find in his position. His clothes are rich and ever so slightly twee – shiny shoes, a knitted sweater – and his hair is a neatly combed auburn quiff. As Cosette looks, she finds herself strangely fascinated.

When she bends to her knees so that their eyes are level and takes a moment to even more carefully survey him, he doesn’t stir. Of course, the boy is hardly human perfection (and he is a boy, too, because he can’t be older than twenty two), but the little birthmarks on his face seem to tell a story that Cosette wants to map out properly, wants to count them. It is only when she brushes one stray strand of hair out of his eyes that he jumps into awareness.

Anyone would be surprised to see a girl like her looking straight into their eyes in a deserted park so early. It is because of this, perhaps, that it takes her so long to realise that he is staring at her unglamoured face. The bird’s eyes, the oil-kissed lips, the visible black veins. Is he scared? He seems almost as fascinated as she is, if shocked.

You see, Cosette has always known that she is not human. She has always understood quite totally the difference between her and ordinary people, and even between her and other fae.

She has always known what her nature is. To ensnare a pretty mortal is only natural. And so, when the urge strikes her that this is the one, this is the human boy for her, she feels no compulsion to do anything but act on it.

“You’re not...” he begins, his voice a rough whisper, but she lays a single pale finger to his lips and silences him. He meant to say ‘human’, probably, or ‘normal’, or ‘a dream’. Perhaps he was even about to ask if she was a nightmare, or a hallucination.

“I’m Cosette.” she whispers. “I came from the woods. Who are you?”

“Marius Pontmercy.” He doesn’t even think about it.

Cosette has always known what she is; and now she bares her teeth at him in a feral smile, for it is with the gift of his name that she has a chance to fulfil her purpose, her destiny. Take her place among the fae.

Who can blame her for claiming her prize with a kiss?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Does it need an epilogue?


	6. Epilogue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A goodbye from Marius

Marius can hardly remember that he's human anymore.

There are long limbs, gangly, with clumsy fingers or toes at the end. That's a human thing, right? He's pretty sure he can move them at will - it's just that he doesn't want to. Besides, there are fae with longer limbs around. There are far prettier fae than him, too...

Wait. Is he _not_ fae?

No, no, his eyes are an ordinary green, his skin imperfect and pinkish, his hair a mess of gingery brown. Those aren't things that faeries are.

"Marius," chides a soft voice. It is like music, like heaven. Heaven in C major. "You're thinking too much again."

He glances up from where he's surveying his fingers raptly, touched with blue in the cold, to the alien face above him. Marius startles a little every time he sees it, those inhuman features, but it is so, so beautiful.

Hold up. It? No. She. _She_ is beautiful and terrible in equal parts, and he's not sure if he thinks of that as a good thing.

Of course, he's not supposed to be thinking. It only causes problems - grandfather said so too; but when he tries to recall his grandfather all that he sees is a stern frown and inaudible harsh words, loud as he flees his home and decides to just rough it in the city park until he can sort out of his life, and then, and then it all fades to a blur - and the last thing that Marius wants in the world is to cause problems for the hellish angel he is crumpled at the feet of.

She is lounging on a living throne of sapling trees, her pale hair in ringlets around her pale face, and he's pretty sure her coal eyes are glancing over him. It's hard to tell. His vision swims with exhaustion - Marius can't remember the last time he slept for more than few minutes, but then again, he can't really remember anything.

(For a scarce nanosecond, that information makes him deathly afraid.

Then he forgets.)

The faerie taps her tapered nails against her chin thoughtfully, and he blushes scarlet. He feels wretchedly ashamed of disappointing her, however he has. Oh, god, he doesn't even know her name, her name is - what is it?

 _Cosette_. Relief floods him and he relaxes as his numbed lips form the word.

"Cosette." mumbles Marius hopefully. When she graces him with a gentle smile, almost like that which you would aim at a little child, he grins lopsidedly back.

An obnoxiously loud sigh sounds from their left, but he hardly notices.

"Why do you indulge the boy so?" groans a voice that sends chills through him, even though he tries his very best not to listen. How can he not listen? He is spellbound.

Hesitantly, Marius allows his eyes to flicker away from his mistress and to the face beside her: the features themselves are barely corporeal, slipping from his mind like sand through splayed fingers, but the sharpened antlers above them snag his broken memory and cut his breath short. There are rusty stains smearing them that he hopes without conviction didn't come from anything... alive.

"Because he's pretty."

If Marius had any dignity left, he would swear he doesn't _preen_. But he doesn't. Anyway, he doesn't really believe her. Too long limbs, untidy hair, stupid old man clothes - which appear to be missing, actually, except for his kitted sweater and his briefs. All the deficit of clothing does is make him seem even more elongated, washed-out, sad-

"Stop thinking." sing-songs Cosette again, and he obediently does.

"You're too soft on him." says the other voice, the one belonging to the face below the antlers.

"They're _fragile,_ Montparnasse. Like bone china, or baby birds."

"I believe the word you are searching for is 'disposable'."

She clucks her tongue at him in disapproval.

"Oh, Cosette, please. Baby birds fall out of the nest, humans break bones. They're cheap."

Ha ha. Baby birds - cheap. Cheep cheep cheep.

"And what of _your_ missing pet?" she snaps back. "Not so cheap then."

The antlered man sends her a glare so full of fire that Marius winces further into the ground at her feet. Wordlessly, she strokes his hair as comfort.

"He wasn't human, anyway." Montparnasse snarls back.

Human. The words seems familiar and yet strange, as though he should know it but isn't really sure, and it conjures vague visions of a bustling, boring life: grandfather, aunt, linguistics, law school. He doesn't miss it, not really.

"Do you know what night it is, Marius?" Cosette asks, sweet as sugar. He shakes his head in confusion. Is it even night? Oh, right. It is. Cold, dark, stars, the moon suspended against the ink of the sky, a silver sliver.

"It's the Winter Solstice. Tonight, the queen ordered me and 'Parnasse to offer a tithe to the Solitary Fae, in exchange for their obedience. Look."

Marius's gaze slides slowly nowadays; little surprise, then, that by the time he is glancing curiously into the thick crosshatch of thorny trees that surround the willow grove, figures have appeared. In the deep shadows, he can see only fractions of nightmare shapes. Red goat legs, a face of bark, a woman shifting in and out of the visible spectrum, flaming hair hanging in terrified dark eyes. As one, the monstrous figures drop into a deep bow to the willow thrones and the two magnificences reclining there.

The fleeting fear that so often grasps Marius has him in its grip again, like a knife of ice between his shoulderblades, but with terror comes clarity. Montparnasse is a dark prince, magic flowing through his veins and back to those who had been exiled - Marius sees their lidless, scleraless eyes light up with wild delight, sees impossibly wide grins, and shudders - but beside the prince, who is the girl?

A changeling. A faerie. Not Montparnasse's wife, never, and yet very much still a princess. As the antlered one rises to his feet, staring with a bloodlust towards the red-haired, doe-eyed face that Marius had glimpsed, her radiance only increases. Marius, even as helpless as he is, adjusts his perception of her.

She is a _queen_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That's all, folks! And, yes, the siren we see is Jehan. Sorry.

**Author's Note:**

> In future chapters, there will be an abusive relationship between Jehan and Montparnasse, with Jehan being non-explicitly but very definitely seriously injured, mentally fucked-with, and kept prisoner. Also, not abusive but power imbalance between any human/faerie relationship to the point where the human is unable to give full consent because they are enchanted. Specifically, this applies to Courferre and J/B/M.  
> Also, this was partially inspired by 'On Tenterhooks' by aflowercrownforaqueen!


End file.
